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Distinctly Catholic

I do not doubt that Mitt Romney is a good and decent man. The stories of his personal generosity are many and moving. A friend who had dealings with Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts always found him receptive and responsive.

I suppose we have all done it at least once. You feel the need to say something to appease one person in the room, but you want to re-assure a different person that your words should not be taken at face value. So, you mouth the words, turn to the second person, and give them a knowing wink.

Bishop Anthony Taylor has posted the text of a recent homily he delivered that touched on the upcoming election. I do not know Bishop Taylor, but I have very fond memories of worshipping at the Cathedral of St.

The online journal of the Danforth Center, Religion & Politics, explores the often treacherous cultural fault lines between religion and politics, but if that were not enough, they have now posted an article by Max Perry Mueller that throws race into the already combustible mix. Mueller is too kind to say that Andrew Sullivan's recent Daily Beast essay on this topic demonstrated - again!

Ezra Klein’s article this morning focuses on an issue that has been bothering me for some time: The fact that GOP obstructionism these past four years appears to be working. Citing a string of newspapers endorsing Governor Romney on the hope that he will be able to work with Congress across party lines, Klein rightly wonders if the logic of these arguments will not actually embolden the intransigents in both parties.

Listening to bishops at election time can be dispiriting. So many seem intent on finding slightly opaque ways to tell their flock exactly how to vote, offering tendentious renderings of the moral calculi at work in voting, or invoking important moral categories like "intrinsic evil" and "prudential judgment" in ways that would not pass a Moral Theology exam in an undergraduate course.

The group Catholic Democrats has published an e-book, “America Undecided,” in the final weeks of the election which, as the title indicates, is aimed at those sitting on the fence in the presidential election and making the case as to why those fence sitters should come down on the side of re-electing President Obama. Fill Disclosure: I know and admire two of the authors of the book, Doug Kmiec and Patrick Whelan, although I do not know the third, Edward Gaffney.

Over at First Things and in his weekly column distributed to various Catholic papers, George Weigel asks “What Kind of Country Do You Want?” The short answer, of course, is a country with a higher standard of intellectual life such that it would recognize agitprop like Weigel’s essay for the partisan hackery it is. For the long answer, let’s take Weigel’s options one by one.